World Efficiency Solutions (WES) is the premier international meeting for the low-carbon and resource-efficient economy focussed on creating the low-carbon and resource-efficient market place. WES was first held in 2015 in Paris during COP21 negotiations, focusing on climate change solutions. World Efficiency develops a new environment consensus: economic and human activities must, to be sustainable, be redesigned to limit their impact on the environment while awareness of the planetary limits (climate change and resources scarcity) becomes widespread. A key objective for WES 2017 is to Identify new market opportunities aligned to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (estimated market opportunities are larger than USD 12 trillion) and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change from 2015.

This paper provides an overview on societal challenges and opportunities associated with waste valorization strategies, contributing to SDG 12. Moving away from the linear economy model, waste becomes a resource rather than a burden for the society. Focusing on two specific waste streams – namely plastics and food supply chain wastes – it explores a circular economy model. Bearing in mind that waste is a resource, initiatives all over the world should not only target minimizing or totally stopping land-filling but also reducing existing land-fills through landfill mining. In accordance with SDG 17, Clark suggests a three-way partnership between industry, government and the public – where each actor plays a specific role in promoting new technologies, developing supportive regulations and embracing a new consumption attitude towards waste.

Venus and Alexandri present a model to bridge the organic waste sector and the chemical production sector to develop bio-based platform chemicals, showing connectedness of SDGs 9,11 and 12. Starting with an overview of some of the potential feedstock routes to bio-based platform chemicals, the authors provide an overview of the opportunities, value, production routes, and examples of companies producing these platform chemistries. They conclude with a number of technical and institutional challenges to bio-based platform chemical production as well as potential opportunities moving forward.

Production wells in oil and gas industries are continually exposed to highly corrosive environments during stimulation treatments such as acidization. Acid treatment is used to increase rock permeability. However, these acids can be corrosive and the corrosive inhibitors that are added are environmentally damaging. This paper explores the research into corrosion inhibitors that are environmentally friendly, contributing to SDG 13.

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Despite loss of life and economic devastation worldwide due to increasingly frequent natural and man-made disasters, scientific research on disasters represents a small percentage of scholarly output. Furthermore, countries with the highest death tolls from disasters tend to be low-income countries and have low-levels of scholarly output overall and in disaster science; countries with higher research output overall, as well as in disaster science, tend to be high-income countries and sustain the greatest economic losses from disasters. This report advances SDG 11 target 5, which is specifically concerned with disaster risk reduction.

Traditional nutrient recycling systems in China have been recognized as a good model for long-term sustainability. Nevertheless, the traditional philosophy has not been well inherited in modern society, and the consequences of environmental degradation from the changed nutrient management systems have not been well recognized by the public. If the additional nutrient sources in future urbanization cannot be well recycled, people will face more challenging environmental problems. The analysis of the environmental and economic costs from wastewater treatment systems indicates that the road for nutrient management after the 1980s was not the right choice. China should re-evaluate the value of the traditional philosophy and develop new technologies to meet modern socioeconomic requirements. These insights support many of the targets to advance SDG 11 Sustainable cities and communities.

Ecological infrastructure (EI) refers to ecosystems that deliver services to society, functioning as a nature-based equivalent of, or complement to, built infrastructure. EI is critical for socio-economic development, supporting a suite of development imperatives at local, national and international scales. This paper presents the myriad of ways that EI supports sustainable development, using South Africa and the South African National Development Plan as a case study, linking to the Sustainable Development Goals on a global level. We show the need for EI across numerous development and sustainability issues, including food security, water provision, and poverty alleviation contributing to several SDGs not least, goals 1, 11 and 17.

Despite its potential advantages, a bioenergy system poses several conceptual and operational challenges for academic as well as practical scrutiny because the inherent relationship and the intersection of areas related to energy production and agricultural activity requires a deeply integrated assessment. The aim of this paper is to review the available works in this field and propose an approach for supporting policymakers in the decision taking process of deploying sustainable bioenergy systems and in doing so, help to inform SDG 7.

Urban transport is associated with a large burden of global disease and premature mortality. These impacts are preventable by changing current urban transport planning and policy. Cities now have access to an increasingly wide range of transport policy measures whose health impacts are unclear. Highlighting the synergies between SDG 3 and SDG 11, this paper provides an overview of 64 different transport policy measures indexed in KonSULT and an indication of their expected health impacts.